Book Reviews

Intellectual Freedom Manual, 10th ed. Comp. the Office for Intellectual Freedom. Martin Garnar and Trina Magi, eds. Chicago, IL: American Library Association, 2021. 352p. Paper, $69.99 ($62.99 ALA members) (ISBN 9780838948187).

Intellectual freedom (IF), the freedom to seek and obtain information across viewpoints, is a long-supported ethical cornerstone of librarianship. Supporting intellectual freedom within libraries is widely seen as a vital underpinning to democracy. This newest edition of the IFM, like former editions, recounts and explicates the history of intellectual freedom within the profession. Comprising 16 sections (over three parts), the updated edition includes 17 essays by such renowned IF scholars as Deborah Caldwell-Stone, Theresa Chmara, Kristin Pekoll, Helen R. Adams, and others. As such, the IFM remains the authoritative reference work on this subject and makes a strong case for why intellectual freedom matters while giving practical advice on how to support intellectual freedom within the library. This edition also continues the IFM’s tradition of evolving and adapting topics in response to the evolution of libraries and librarianship. Accordingly, some valuable ancillary issues are included for discussion, while other information has been taken out or added. Copyright is a wise inclusion carried over from the 9th edition, but now gone is the “Deeper Look” specifically dealing with privacy concerns and RFID. The section dealing with “Meeting Rooms, Exhibit Spaces, Programming, and Education” has also been expanded on from the 9th edition. A particularly useful addition is section 10 (in the second part), entitled “Special Lenses: Guidance across Issues.” This section includes chapters on Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion, Intellectual Freedom for Academic Libraries, Politics, Religion, Free Expression, and the Visual and Performing Arts. Though such a section may seem to be a bit of a hodge-podge, the effect is rather that any questions or uncertainties on the part of the reader have been anticipated and addressed. This foresight regarding readers’ potential anxieties is one of the IFM’s major strengths. Ample resources to learn more about an issue are provided throughout the IFM, including the ALA core intellectual freedom documents such as the Library Bill of Rights and the Code of Ethics as well as official ALA policy statements and advice on creating intellectual freedom policies for libraries. In addition, references to further resources are found throughout the manual. Indeed, the IFM is a complete examination of intellectual freedom from multiple angles.

This newest edition comes at an interesting and complicated time for librarianship due to the particularly fractious political divide within the United States. What does intellectual freedom mean in such an era of social reckoning, and why should a library or a community care about IF, especially when hate speech or challenges to library decisions might feel personally harmful to some library workers and community members? This manual does not resolve that issue for the individual reader. Intellectual freedom, for libraries, depends on a belief in neutrality. Perhaps there is no happy medium for the reader who wants to fully support IF within the library while also protecting more vulnerable populations from injurious or inflammatory speech. These positions would appear to be diametrically opposed. The IFM instead offers practical advice for implementing intellectual freedom practices in libraries and answers legal questions regarding intellectual freedom while explaining why librarians and library workers should want to do this. It is a tough lesson in many ways.

While the material is consistently written in a clear, easy-to-follow fashion, readers may still feel unsatisfied and unsure of how to square their own personal feelings with the case the authors make for IF as an absolute principle. This tension is never openly addressed in the IFM outside of advice about how policy can be composed for issues like collection development or uses of meeting spaces to avoid conflict with community or in discussion of how content should not be removed from a library’s collection because it might be found objectionable. However, a chapter new to this edition, “When to Call the Police,” dealing with patron privacy and requests from law enforcement, at least hints at societal conflicts that may sometimes personally affect library workers and the library community. Calling the police is suggested only for times when illegality occurs. This advice will not sit well with librarians who feel that, in choosing neutrality, they are participating in the harm of some part of their communities. The volume’s silence on these components of intellectual freedom may seem inadequate for library workers looking to resolve real struggles in their communities.

Critiques of former editions suggested that the IFM was not thorough or broad enough, that dissident positions go unacknowledged, and that the tone is smug and self-righteous. This most recent edition, however, really does appear to have considered such criticism. This is true even in consideration of the critiques being offered in this present review. The IFM is thorough and broad: supplementary issues are addressed (for example, censorship and lobbying are carried over from the previous edition). Dissident positions are addressed in discussions of collection development policies that reflect the entire community—although, as previously mentioned, dissident positions are not addressed in other ways. Finally, the tone of the IFM is straightforward and complete: it reflects both the gravitas and the complexity of the issues but appears to trust the reader to understand the complicated issues and to be capable of making the “right” decisions. In some ways, the IFM even feels nurturing: it gives the reader the materials that they need to understand intellectual freedom.

The thoroughness of the Intellectual Freedom Manual alone makes this a recommended read. Intellectual freedom is a complex, difficult topic, and the IFM handles it well.—Sarah McHone-Chase, Northern Illinois University